Forever Young: The SENSers

As part of my own quest to stay forever young, I take a variety of "magic pills"--nutritional supplements that have shown some laboratory or at least anecdotal evidence of promoting youthfulness, energy, a longer life or just general well-being. I intend to discuss some of the specific ones in future posts.

I agree with the SENSers, though, that their approach--Strategies for Engineered Negligible Senescence, hence, SENS--holds out the best hope for a dramatically extended human life span. (The SENSers include, most prominently, Aubrey de Grey.)

I reommend this web site for a good introduction to SENS. There you'll see SENS defined as,

... a detailed plan for curing human aging. SENS is an engineering project, in the same way that medicine is a branch of engineering. The key to SENS is the appreciation that aging is best viewed as a set of progressive changes in body composition at the molecular and cellular level, caused as side-effects of essential metabolic processes. These changes are therefore best thought of as an accumulation of "damage", which becomes pathogenic above a certain threshold of abundance. ... the engineering (SENS) strategy is not to interfere with metabolism per se, but to repair or obviate the accumulating damage and thereby indefinitely postpone the age at which it reaches pathogenic levels.

There's also a page describing the SENS approach and terminology in layman's language, and a collection of FAQs, including this page on "Why we should do all we can to hasten the defeat of human aging," which answers some of the main objections to projects aimed at overcoming aging and promoting longer lives.

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